Communitization is one of the most important directions in which the Internet develops. Many famous community websites, such as Weibo, Tianya, Qzone, Pengyou, RenRen, Xiaonei, and the like, are now providing to the masses of users a broader space for social activities without spatial and temporal limitations, and are gradually becoming an indispensable part of people's life.
With the development of network communitization, more and more people are using various communities, and the number of users within each community is also increasing rapidly. Finding persons in which the user is interested in the community, that is, a function for search ranking of community users, has become an important application provided to the user by the community. As to this application, how to quickly and accurately find the community users for which the user is searching from a massive amount of data and appropriately rank search results is an important factor reflecting the performance of this function.
However, in the search ranking provided by most of the communities nowadays, the searching part employs solely a user attribute matching search, and the ranking part simply employs ranking by degree of matching. That is, in the background of the community, user attribute fields, such as name, birth date, school, company, location, interests, etc. of the user, are stored fields by fields. When a search is conducted, searching and matching are performed in these fields based on a keyword inputted by the user to obtain search results; and the search results are ranked by the degree of matching with the keyword.
Given the current number of community users, a lot of search results will be obtained using the existing search ranking method. Also, because a single ranking factor is used, a lot of search results will have the same degree of matching. In the prior art, such search results are usually randomly ranked. As a result, search results seen by the user on the first page or first few pages of search results are not optimized, and are quite different from what the user really needs. The user usually needs to conduct multiple searches before he/she can find the desired person.